Two Centimeters and Counting

If you refer back, Annie’s Day began with two medium regulars and a dose of Pitocin. My wife and I woke up on a Thursday morning, calm and happy, because we knew what lay ahead of us, immediately anyway. We are a little more than a year removed from an eight hour stretch of joy and pain that changed my life forever and yet here I am again, in the same house with the same worries, waiting.

This time though, our anticipation has no timeline. We sit here every night and watch my wife’s belly roll and we laugh at how “Two” tries to punch and kick her way out. We go to bed flat on our backs, staring at the ceiling, wondering what life will be like tomorrow. While I follow the whir of the ceiling fan, I look back with true dread on the days of last fall when I had my own personal wake up call every three hours. Am I really about to do that again?

June 28, 2007 kicked off the best year of my life; a year in which I learned more about myself than any other. For the first time ever, I woke up every day looking forward instead of back. I finally had a purpose, and I was finally good, no great, at a job. In the past I could fake it well enough, and due to a solid work ethic, accomplish what needed to be done. But underneath I always knew the limitations that were set by my lack of joy in what I was doing. AT&T (22-25) was a train wreck. ADP (25), even worse. JCrew (26-31) went well for me and I was well respected, but deep in the back of my mind I knew that the boredom would surface sooner rather than later.

Yet here I was, 13 months ago, being handed a new life by an accomplished woman and a society whose rules are changing. Sure, there are plenty of men who look at my life and consider me less manly than they are, but for the first time my brain and my heart are comfortable. Without the drive of my wife, none of his would have ever happened and, chances are, I would still be miserable and anxious.

Much of my stress free life is due to the joy of spending so much time with a person as beautiful as Annie and the sense of accomplishment and pride that I get each time she learns something new or touches someone else (read: Trish) the way she touches me. Whatever it was that caused the anxiety in my life—I think it was knowing that I never tried to work at something I loved—is gone now that I write every day.

So here we are, two centimeters and counting, and the script of my life will be flipped again. Perfection will be gone and be replaced with, well, something less than that. I am afraid to return to older posts and read about how miserable I was in the beginning. I prefer to think of the second half of Annie’s first year, when the rewards of our labor began shining through. There is a bright side. I have always said that I write better when sad, so this space (whenever I can get to it) should improve dramatically.